Latest / Aurangzeb: The Emperor Who Expanded and Broke the Mughal Empire — Fexingo History / Aurangzeb's Deccan Campaigns: The War That Broke the Mughal Empire
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Aurangzeb's various wars — the Rajputs, the Sikhs, the Ahoms. But if you look at what truly broke the Mughal Empire, it was the Deccan campaigns. He spent the last 25 years of his life down there, and it basically bankrupted the empire. Luna: Twenty-five years? He just moved his entire court to the Deccan? Lucas: Exactly. From 1682 until his death in 1707, Aurangzeb lived in the Deccan, commanding campaigns personally. He set up his capital in a camp that moved with the army. It was called the 'moving capital' — there's a Persian phrase, 'Urdū-yi Mu'allā', meaning the exalted camp. And it was enormous — hundreds of thousands of soldiers, merchants, artisans, all following the emperor. Lucas: The target was the Maratha Empire. After Shivaji's death in 1680, his son Sambhaji carried on the fight. But Aurangzeb captured and executed Sambhaji in 1689 in a particularly brutal way — he was tortured for weeks, then beheaded. That should have ended it, but it didn't. Luna: What happened? Didn't the Marathas fall apart? Lucas: They did temporarily. But then Shivaji's younger son Rajaram escaped to the fort of Gingee in Tamil Nadu, and the Marathas regrouped. And this is where the warfare shifted — they adopted guerrilla tactics, what they called 'Ganimi Kava'. hit and run raids, cutting supply lines, avoiding pitched battles. Aurangzeb's massive army, designed for set-piece battles, was useless against it. Lucas: The Mughals captured Gingee in 1698, but by then Rajaram had died, and his widow Tarabai took over. She was a brilliant strategist — she kept the resistance going with a network of Maratha chiefs who harassed Mughal supply lines across the Deccan. The war became a war of attrition. Luna: So the Mughal army was stuck, chasing a shadow enemy? Lucas: Exactly. And it got worse. The Mughals had also annexed the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda by 1687, which gave them more territory but also more enemies and more frontier to defend. The Marathas formed alliances with local zamindars and even with the Mughal emperor's own disaffected nobles. At one point, Aurangzeb's own son, Prince Muhammad Akbar, rebelled and fled to the Marathas. Lucas: The financial cost was staggering. The Mughal treasury was drained by the endless campaigns. The historian Jadunath Sarkar calculated that Aurangzeb spent something like 100 million rupees a year on the Deccan war. To put that in perspective, the annual revenue of the empire was maybe 200 million rupees. Half the budget went to one war. Luna: That's insane. No wonder the empire collapsed after he died. Lucas: Right. When Aurangzeb died in 1707, his successors inherited a bankrupt empire with overstretched borders. Within a decade, the Marathas were raiding deep into Mughal territory, and by 1737 they were at the gates of Delhi. The Deccan campaigns didn't just fail — they created the very power that would dismantle the Mughal Empire. Lucas: There's also an overlooked naval dimension. The Marathas under Kanhoji Angre built a formidable navy that controlled the Konkan coast. They attacked Mughal shipping and even allied with the Portuguese and British at different times. Aurangzeb had no real navy, so he could never cut off Maratha supply lines from the sea. Luna: So the Marathas had a kind of asymmetric advantage on land and sea? Lucas: Exactly. And the Mughals never adapted. Aurangzeb was a brilliant administrator and a devout Muslim, but he was also stubborn. He refused to negotiate with the Marathas, refused to accept Hindu rulers as allies after a certain point. His religious policies, like reimposing the jizya, alienated potential Rajput allies. So he was fighting on multiple fronts with dwindling resources. Lucas: One of the most telling episodes is the siege of Wagingera in 1705. The Maratha fort was held by a chief named Parshuram Trimbak. Aurangzeb invested the fort with his entire army, but after months of siege, with his soldiers dying of disease and starvation, he had to retreat. On his deathbed, he wrote letters to his sons warning them not to fight among themselves, because the Marathas were too strong. Luna: He literally knew the empire was doomed. Lucas: He did. And that leads to something I want to mention. If you're enjoying these deep dives into Mughal history, just a small way to support the show — a couple of dollars a month on Buy Me a Coffee makes a real difference. It's at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what keeps these episodes ad-free and allows us to spend time on topics like the Deccan campaigns. Luna: Yeah, it's a small thing that adds up. And we really appreciate it. Lucas: Absolutely. So, back to the Deccan. After Aurangzeb's death, the Marathas under Shahu, Shivaji's grandson, and his Peshwa Baji Rao I, expanded rapidly. They even marched on Delhi in 1737 — essentially fulfilling the trajectory that started with those guerrilla raids in the Deccan. The Mughal Empire never recovered. Lucas: The irony is that Aurangzeb's expansion in the Deccan was meant to secure the empire's southern frontier and spread Islamic rule. Instead, it created a power vacuum that the Marathas filled, and then the British East India Company. By 1818, the Maratha Confederacy itself was dismantled by the British. So the Deccan campaigns set off a chain reaction that ended with British colonial rule. Luna: So in a way, Aurangzeb's biggest failure was his biggest success — he conquered the Deccan, but lost the empire. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the tragic arc of his reign. He was the last great Mughal emperor in terms of territorial expansion, but his methods sowed the seeds of collapse. The Deccan war is a textbook case of overreach — an empire that tries to hold too much, with too rigid a system, breaks under its own weight.